ANTenna Blog -- Services

Cloud computing is often promoted as leveling the playing field between small businesses and large enterprises. But Andrew R. Jassy, senior vice president of Web services at Amazon, says that small companies use the cloud differently.

Jassey was recently interviewed by Forbes' Ed Sperling, and he touched on a wide variety of topics. But I was most interested in his comments about small companies.

As usual, Jassey noted that, "We have a pretty wide customer base ranging from start-ups to enterprises." But when asked about the differences between large and small customers, he responded:

Large customers aren't starting from ground zero. They have a pretty significant infrastructure. They have legacy software they have to figure out how they're going to migrate. What we're seeing is they pick a couple of projects to run as pilots. What they find is the value proposition is attractive from the standpoint of not having to run that muck yourself, from a scale perspective and from a time to market perspective. We can provision servers in minutes vs. weeks. For them to even to get a server takes eight to 12 weeks. This way they can run the test, see what they can peel off and they start to build a year or two plan to peel off parts of their infrastructure.

But for startups:

It's so hard to get funding from VCs that [these services are] a huge benefit to start-ups. They don't have to spend that CapEx on a data center or co-location or servers. It's a huge advantage to turn CapEx into a variable expense. They also don't have to deal with a legacy infrastructure. They're building their services directly on our infrastructure.

See The Entire Forbes Interview: Amazon's Golden Cloud